I threw myself into loose leaf and didn’t start seeking an education til recently. While it’s awesome to learn new things from people, tea is best learned from experience and personal research as each person’s tastes in tea as well as what aspects they’re interested in differs.

Interesting. I started with books. I ordered several before I ordered tea and read them through and then ordered tea based on what I’d learned from the books. I suspect that each person’s style when it comes to learning things will differ. You sound like your style is primarily experiential while mine is somewhat more analytical (or at least bookish). It sounds like teaplz would prefer a learning style that is less isolated and more communal.

Mine wasn’t isolated, but the people I talked to and I really didn’t get into education of tea. It was more “What do you like?”. Then I dove in, got TOTALLY overwhelmed and am now screaming “HELP I HAVEBRAINOVERLOAD!” lol.

Well put, Carolyn. I’m more of an involved learner. I’d rather sit down and have a conversation with someone. I retain information better when I can relate it to something and communal learning is more fluid for me in that way. That’s a big part of why I got so excited when I stumbled upon Steepster for the first time.

I think I’m a combination of analytical and communal. I did a tremendous amount of reading on tea before I even got into it. I’m a researcher by nature. But other’s opinions sometimes can really help you along on your tea experience. I’m not saying to follow everything that everyone says, but it’s nice to have people to jump to when a steep doesn’t go well, or a tea tin that has a stuck lid. I’m fully into the ideas/information exchange is one of the most important things today. Steepster is a great source for all of this information.

All three of us (Steepster Overlords) think it looks like a different thing. Although Jack (http://steepster.com/jack) knows the original intention. I think (and I like it because of this) that it’s intentionally open for interpretation…you see what you want out of it.

A field to enter where we got the tea from (i.e. free sample, gift, bought directly from company/website, steepster select, bought for self another place). What I drink if it’s free is different than what I may drink if I have to pay for it.

I agree with this, as somebody who enjoys gripping up her pennies. Most of the time when I can get upscale bagged teas like Zhena’s at Grocery Outlet I say so, but some folks may not care for dollars and cents as part of the actual notes on tasting. It would be nice to place it in another area, especially if users do end up being able to locate each other by region; it’d make it easier to try new teas available everywhere, but support local economies and jobs.

Tons of ideas! I’ve replied to the ones that I like above. But as a new user, a brief Steepster User Guide would have been helpful (new users don’t know what a dashboard is!).

There should also be ability for more privacy – maybe some users don’t want strangers “following” their every use of this website or every ‘note to self’ about how they brewed their tea to perfection that morning.

The “latest activity” feature drives me crazy. It includes tasting notes which can already by viewed by going to “tasting notes”. As for the rest (cupboard additions, likes, etc), you only get the past hour so what’s the point? You’ve already missed 2 hrs, 3 hrs, 4 hrs ago…and so on. If you are interested in someone’s activity, you follow them. If you are interested in general activity, don’t you want to know what happened for the day, not just the past hour? Otherwise you are missing most activity anyway. Plus everytime you leave the page for a few minutes and go back…it’s starts back at an hour ago and you have to wait for it to catch up to where you left off last time you viewed it. Maybe it’s just me? Maybe I just don’t understand how this is useful to me.

I never experienced Steepster pre “cupboard”. Love this feature. Just wish I could organize the teas to group them together by company and maybe add the “best sipped before” date so I know which ones I should drink up soon.

1. I can keep it running in a tab and just keep peeking at it if I know I’m going to be browsing the site for a while.

2. It gives me a chance to see notes whatnot from users that I’m not following. I’ve started following many people as a result of what I’ve seen from the live feed. I don’t often get around to checking out the “tasting notes” page to look for logs there, because it can quickly become overwhelming. This way, I get a nice little snapshot. I figure that I’ll stumble across active users who write things I’d like to see because either I’ll catch them on live feed at some point or I’ll see a lot of people liking/commenting on their entries.

3. It saves me from having to hit refresh and find my place again on the dashboard or other pages.

4. I think it’s fun to watch. Especially when there are a lot of people online and the site’s going nuts.

I think that you’ve already answered your own question as to why the live feed only shows the past hour when you mentioned the bit about waiting for it to catch up. It would take 24 times as long to catch itself if it went for the entire day.

Anyhow, I just see this as a nice bonus feature that the Steepster team decided to include for us. I find it useful, but if you don’t that’s fine, too. I’m sure that there are plenty of people who are using it differently from me or perhaps are avoiding it completely. Either way, there is a lot of other great stuff to utilize on Steepster, right?

I’m one of the people who doesn’t use the live feed. I think it is the cause of some internet problems I’ve had. (It predictably causes problems for me in Safari with Comcast if I leave it running so I’m avoiding it for now.) But there are many different features for different people. No one is going to use all of them or use them the same way.

In general, I am not as interested in what people do (put things in their cupboard, note that they like a tasting note, etc.) as in what they write in their tasting notes or on the board. So I’m the opposite of takgoti. I make heavy use of the Tasting Notes and the Discussion area and don’t use the Latest Activity feature, which, even if it were trouble-free for me, is somewhat overwhelming.

I myself really like the live feed. Then again, I’m really into finger-to-the-pulse things. I’m a heavy Internet user, and very net-savvy, linked into dozens of websites and such, so features like this really interest me. I’ve sat through live Twitter interviews, streaming live concerts, and stuff like that. I don’t have to constantly refresh a page to see if comments are coming in, and I can leave it running in the background and check it ever so often to see new stuff coming in. It really is interesting and useful, but I can see how it could be a turn-off for some people.

@Tea4Me Whoops, sorry, that completely slipped by me! There is no thread for newbie questions, but by all means feel free to start one. I think you’ll find that most folks here are friendly and willing to try and answer any questions you may have about how the site works.

Not sure if it has been mentioned already, but it would be nice to be able to send private messages to other users. I was just trying to figure out how to let someone here know that their tea had shipped out.

Yes, I want to know this, too – how many people own the tea. Additionally, perhaps the option to search by most commonly purchased. So you can see the type of herbal tea or rooibos tea that are owned by more people. The “best sellers”.

A temp field instead of a slider so we can enter the exact temp we steep at, not just rounded up or down to the nearest 15 degrees. Also make a check box for iced instead of having it on the temp spectrum. When I make fresh iced tea I want to tell how I steep it before chilling it.

Being able to rate and log usage of tea related products/accessories and linking them into our tea tasting notes. For example: (I’m using other ideas such as measurement fields to illustrate this, fields are brackets) [2.25g] Adagio’s Thai Chai [recieved as a gift] steeped in [2oz] purified water heated to [180 degrees F] in [Adagio’s UtiliTEA (this would be a link) [bought for myself online] for 3 min in [ Rishi Tea’s Danme Ushirode] (link) [bought for myself at (store name)] w/ [4oz] [coconut mik] and [1tsp] [Republic of tea’s Chai Spice honey for tea] (link) [bought thru Steepster Select]. This would also be great logging food we eat that has tea in it. (i.e. stirfy using Republic of Tea’s stirfry collection) or [served with]. Tea is so much more than a beverage! It’s accessories and an ingredient in cooking.

Well I just wanted to compare several black teas just a moment ago. I just opened a few tabs and switched between them. I mean it isn’t a pain, but a side by side comparison would be nice. I was just looking at the ratings just now.

Haha, I wasn’t specific, because I don’t really know what specific features I’d want. It isn’t a recommendation feature. Haven’t you wanted a side by side comparison of several tea? Like say you’re looking to purchase either Tea X, Tea Y or Tea Z.

Then how do you expect them to implement the feature the way you want? And if it’s not a feature recommendation, what is it doing in this thread. I see your theory, but it doesn’t work for teas. Tea isn’t like computers or microwaves. The only things you really could really compare would be price per cup (since the size of the packages would differ), over all rating, and shipping charges. Come to think of it that would be nice. Then you wouldn’t have to go to each individual site and do math to figure out what the cheapest option would be.

Exactly ^. I mean it has potential, but it really depends if they implement some more fields. Like I would love to see which tea has high tannin levels or which one gets bitter if you steep too long. But they don’t have an option for that yet, so the comparison doesn’t work.

Don’t compare too much…just buy them all! Here’s what I do: if it interests me in the least, I add it to my shopping list, and then I revisit the shopping list to do a little more investigating and comparing. Yes, you have to flip back and forth but I find I do that a lot with online shopping anyway.

@Tea4Me, not everyone has the monetary or storage ability to buy everything in sight. If 2 companies offer the same tea at the same quality, I’m gonna buy the cheaper one (w/ shipping if applicable factored in).